Engine Art & Funcion (Finally)
10 years ago
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Play with words
I wielded a double-edged sword in phrasing that continuities are all too apparent... this, aside from the affirmation of connection between similar aspects, also ascribes that I lack the discretion to discern a substantial enough difference.
Alas, there are important similarities, and it must be known that all things human, as all things are in the universe, are ever-evolving, and ever-changing.
The first thing I want to do before presenting any religious ideas is present a little exercise in the use of language. I've always been a very literal thinker, and my association with words and phrases often puts me in an odd position because things are said that I'm meant somehow to understand some colloquial association or double meaning that I fail to grasp, seeing the terms literally.
So, in reading the past year or so, I've forced myself to pull out the common phrases that writers, scientists, and scholars use and realize how absurd they are in a literal sense (making it doubly difficult to read a British English translation of a French work published 50 years ago, for example); this of course meaning not their colloquial application, but their original, root context, and in some circumstances, it includes the actual term-applying process when dealing with more esoteric topics (elite-speak). One thing I found to start is how ridiculous latin terms are as a means of general communication; they are a rather overly-poetic form of description and labeling, and many of our modern and technical words come from Latin or Greek, of course. In fact, and in odd coincidence, their descendant forms have very different contexts, even within related modern languages...
... and though I find linguistic progressions fascinating, I tend to put other people to sleep, so on to the exercise:
dead man walking
one in the oven
going nuts
relative/ism (at least three different technical meanings that are not directly related and even rather misleading)
jigsaw puzzle
objective
yeah, we could keep on going, but I'm sure you get the point (and of course when I sit down to do this, all of them escape my mind); and it doesn't just stop at short terms... but instances like describing continents as shuttling cargo, ants commanding armies; my favorite is how I might try to describe anything I did at the lab, no matter how simple it actually was, but it sounds so complicated and impressive simply because of the terms I have to use to describe it: it requires terms and concepts with which laymen are not readily familiar.
That's the important part... when terms are made up or borrowed, turned into something meaningful... when later people read them, which do they conceptualize?
"there was a discharge and later he died"
This could mean any number of things, and even more so now that the term is now applied to aspects of society and technology. We would assume there would be background included in surrounding text.
"a battle ensued, and the guard failed, and one innocent was hit and wounded"
a discharged weapon leading to a death?
the wound was infected and led to his death?
the guard was discharged from service and later died?
The key to knowing is either in knowing the most common usage for the term 'discharge', or else having a less limiting source of information...
this may all seem properly ambiguous, but to those who are among the elite for whom the text is written, there is an understanding despite the outward ambiguity; the understanding is either of the situation itself or of the terms involved to describe it.
If this seems far-fetched, consider one interesting thing about history: Europe's most famous romance: King Arthur. A man so famous in his time that nothing was written about him. Songs were written for him, but no one knows what they mean, everyone assumed everyone who would hear knew enough to know about him. And the killer is that (haha, snuck one in on you) he may have been known under this title or that (historians have only that to debate on), and even what may be his name referenced by even a contemporary Roman official, is still only a title of sorts. The only thing that can be said for certain is that he fought, died and the next generation of people on what's now England started naming their kids Arthur.
Alas, there are important similarities, and it must be known that all things human, as all things are in the universe, are ever-evolving, and ever-changing.
The first thing I want to do before presenting any religious ideas is present a little exercise in the use of language. I've always been a very literal thinker, and my association with words and phrases often puts me in an odd position because things are said that I'm meant somehow to understand some colloquial association or double meaning that I fail to grasp, seeing the terms literally.
So, in reading the past year or so, I've forced myself to pull out the common phrases that writers, scientists, and scholars use and realize how absurd they are in a literal sense (making it doubly difficult to read a British English translation of a French work published 50 years ago, for example); this of course meaning not their colloquial application, but their original, root context, and in some circumstances, it includes the actual term-applying process when dealing with more esoteric topics (elite-speak). One thing I found to start is how ridiculous latin terms are as a means of general communication; they are a rather overly-poetic form of description and labeling, and many of our modern and technical words come from Latin or Greek, of course. In fact, and in odd coincidence, their descendant forms have very different contexts, even within related modern languages...
... and though I find linguistic progressions fascinating, I tend to put other people to sleep, so on to the exercise:
dead man walking
one in the oven
going nuts
relative/ism (at least three different technical meanings that are not directly related and even rather misleading)
jigsaw puzzle
objective
yeah, we could keep on going, but I'm sure you get the point (and of course when I sit down to do this, all of them escape my mind); and it doesn't just stop at short terms... but instances like describing continents as shuttling cargo, ants commanding armies; my favorite is how I might try to describe anything I did at the lab, no matter how simple it actually was, but it sounds so complicated and impressive simply because of the terms I have to use to describe it: it requires terms and concepts with which laymen are not readily familiar.
That's the important part... when terms are made up or borrowed, turned into something meaningful... when later people read them, which do they conceptualize?
"there was a discharge and later he died"
This could mean any number of things, and even more so now that the term is now applied to aspects of society and technology. We would assume there would be background included in surrounding text.
"a battle ensued, and the guard failed, and one innocent was hit and wounded"
a discharged weapon leading to a death?
the wound was infected and led to his death?
the guard was discharged from service and later died?
The key to knowing is either in knowing the most common usage for the term 'discharge', or else having a less limiting source of information...
this may all seem properly ambiguous, but to those who are among the elite for whom the text is written, there is an understanding despite the outward ambiguity; the understanding is either of the situation itself or of the terms involved to describe it.
If this seems far-fetched, consider one interesting thing about history: Europe's most famous romance: King Arthur. A man so famous in his time that nothing was written about him. Songs were written for him, but no one knows what they mean, everyone assumed everyone who would hear knew enough to know about him. And the killer is that (haha, snuck one in on you) he may have been known under this title or that (historians have only that to debate on), and even what may be his name referenced by even a contemporary Roman official, is still only a title of sorts. The only thing that can be said for certain is that he fought, died and the next generation of people on what's now England started naming their kids Arthur.
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